


Builder of Great Heights, Builder of Things

by Elkian (SuperImposed)



Category: Bastion
Genre: Gen, Happy Ending, Implied/Referenced Alcohol Abuse/Alcoholism, Post-Canon, Post-Evacuation, evacuation ending
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-11-10
Updated: 2014-11-10
Packaged: 2018-02-24 19:56:54
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,459
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2594498
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/SuperImposed/pseuds/Elkian
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>How does one come to know a man? Is it in danger, dangling over a volcano? In sorrow, weeping bitter tears?</p><p>Or maybe, it's when he starts anew.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Builder of Great Heights, Builder of Things

**Author's Note:**

> Checking up on my old unfinished fic is always interesting, especially since a lot of it turns out to be between 90-100% done in actuality.

The Kid built things.

When they first met him he swung a hammer with intent to break, destroying every useless or dangerous thing in sight. His bowstring sang the song of destruction, his gunshots and sharp edges rang with it. The mortar, the bellows, the cannon could not sing but roared, punctuating with the percussion of chaos and peril.

The Cores didn’t build things; they made things _able to be built_. Rucks had imagination and technical know-how that the others couldn’t begin to fathom, he brought mechanisms and turbines and power cells into being, he made the Bastion a vehicle of change.

The Kid made the Bastion.

The first building was a Distillery. Well, what could you say. It’d been a rough day, rough week, year, life for the Kid. The Distillery was solid and functional and so Rucks never gave it much thought. The Kid kept building. He brought the Cores back, fair’s fair, and he made useful things.

Kid never worked drunk.

He’d sleep drunk, or knock himself unconscious with alcohol. Some people, the booze made them happy, or mad, or sad, or inventive or paranoid or a number of things. The Kid, alcohol made him horizontal. That was what he wanted, needed.

The few nights before the Distillery was finished but after the Kid’s not-unimpressive booze stash ran dry would be forever etched in Rucks’ memory. For some reason, waking to the sound of that Kid crying in his sleep was worse than the screaming.

Anyways. Kid wasn’t a piss artist. The buildings initially struck one as uninventive, copied from the streets - blocks with doors and a space to put things in.

When the Cores ran out, when the Bastion landed, when they set out together, the three realized the folly of that thinking.

The Kid built things. The buildings he put up by hand were on a level with, and then a level (or two, or six) above what he’d produced in the Bastion. They stayed simple, but in a refined way. The Kid never wasted a thing, not space, not materials, not opportunities.

He’d built five houses before the second family had found their little village.

(The first family was his, of course, with rooms for Rucks and Zulf and Zia and vacant rooms that would have baffled them had they understood him sooner, and baffled less when they understood him later.)

The newcomers took to calling him Mayor. He pointed out time and again that Rucks was the one in charge, or maybe Zulf, leading his new flock to a more literal salvation. But they still call him Mayor, half-smiling at his reluctance, and after a spell he stops correcting them.

He builds the stone wall outside, the big fence inside, the complex but durable mechanisms for the gates. He makes the signs that proclaim “Haven!!” in big Caela and Ura script, pointing through the wilderness to their new home. When the first Ura refugees arrive, he greets them with a smile and gets their advice on defensive tunnels, combining Cael and Ura architecture in new and interesting ways.

He builds a stable for Gazie, the huge Scumbag who trails slime across the fields, fertilizing them (once they figured out the correct feed). He puts up a little fence around Princess’s grass patch, for when the Anklegator isn’t helping till (she don’t bite much, but newbies keep putting a foot wrong).

He builds hutches for Combie and Alco and Venette and Corbain and Madelaine, the Gasfellas (Gasfolk?) who help all over the little village; but, to be fair, Zia and Zulf made the new hoods for them, little smart uniform pieces that identify them as Haven workers. He raises a sturdy shed for the Squirts and their dispensers, and is snuggled half to death with gratitude before he escapes.

He plants perches for Scrub and Zeta, the Pecker King and Queen that seem to rule the nearby flock, who chase away bad Peckers and sometimes can be coaxed into helping plant (turns out Peckers are smart enough to understand _now_ and _later_ , and can be convinced that fruit later is better than dry seeds now).

He sinks the well with Zulf and Rucks’ help, puts up the granary, dry storage, forge, windmill, armory. He builds more than half the village with his own two hands, and appears to enjoy it.

\---------

He carves furniture. Not just thickset slab-on-legs tables, real furniture. He makes subtly different styles with the advice of his friends, so the matching sets in each home have a unique touch.

One time Zulf sees him run his hand down a new chair leg absently, sees something in his face. Asks about it.

Kid’s fallen through a chair or two before. They laughed at him, and it stung. He works to make sure that won’t happen to anyone, ever.

He also makes the first chairs he can actually sit in, that actually fit him. Zulf didn’t realize how much the Kid perched like some ridiculous bird until he sees the man settle onto a proper-size piece.

Kid makes more than furniture. He makes the bows in the armory, smart new pikes set on the shiny new rack. He coils bowstrings, constructs hilts and grips and staves. He cuts and carves and sands and oils wood into shapes no one knew it could be, gleaming with newness and simple strength.

****  


\--------

The Kid’s element **could** be Earth, but Rucks is pretty sure that it’s Fire.

He’s so at home in the forge.

The sparks flying past his ears go unnoticed as the hammer comes down.

The hammer. Rucks had noticed that it was a little off - not quite regulation size, slightly fancier than normal.

Once - the Kid gets surprisingly talkative in the forge - he asks, and gets an answer.

The regulation Wall sledges were fine, the first time around. Got kind of light by the end. Well, they let him take his home since the handmarks all but burned into the stave would dishearten any successor. He didn’t use it in fights, in finding out from a neighbor why the house was empty, his mother gone, the money gone, his home gone, but it was a damn near thing.

The original hammer still serves as a base. The stave’s been replaced a dozen times, the head’s been repaired, reforged, reinforced, and replaced. But it’s still his hammer, no matter how many pieces change.

The head is the size of a small child, three times the weight. Rucks isn’t sure about the handle, but no one has been able to so much as budge it when the Kid puts it down. Kid always lays it to rest real careful, so it can’t overbalance and crush a foot or such by accident.

Kid wields it like a matchstick.

(One day, in a contemplative mood, Rucks heads back to the Bastion, pokes around a bit. He finds what he half expected to - the Kid’s footprints, sunk deep with helpful weight of his old friend. Even the growth of the better part of a year doesn’t hide the impressions.)

****  


\---------

The Kid builds things. Big, tough, durable things, simple things - but small and delicate and complex things too.

Too many people dismiss him at first glance. He’s stocky and bulky and strong and wields a double-size Cael Hammer like a matchstick and therefore must be clumsy and awkward. He must break everything around him by accident.

Kid learned to control that power a long time ago - city might not have survived otherwise. And you only had to see him once in battle before you realized that ‘graceless’ was not a word that applied. If violence could be a dance…

He was a gentle man, though, and careful. Zia remarked once or twice that he gave the best hugs in the world, possibly due to the amount of concentration he put into the task. Zulf wondered if he’d ever hurt someone that way, by accident - it was hard to see the Kid hurting someone on purpose, even after the… issues with the Ura.

Kid _was_  big and strong, but gentle and slow-tempered to balance it out. And he wasn’t stupid. He was simple, and he didn’t have much knowledge outside of certain areas, but he wasn’t stupid.

Two years of building, building, building - two years of Haven. That was how long it took for them all to be sure they knew him, down to the soul. One would it expect it to be the restless weeks on the Bastion - and maybe those contributed, seeing how Rucks and Zulf and Zia still knew him best of all. But it wasn’t in violence and strife and destruction that one learned who the Kid was.

It was in creation that he shone through.

 


End file.
